There are five stages of a relationship between a man and a woman.

1. Lust and romance.
2. Power struggle.
3. Working.
4. Commitment.
5. Blissful love.

Unfortunately, most couples only get to stage two and then break up.

Some couples get to stage three and four, but they’re not really happy.

They feel more like friends, there’s no sexual spark, or the woman or the man is thinking of maybe leaving and trying to find someone else.

The real prize of a relationship between a man and a woman is to get to the fifth stage, the Blissful Love stage.

When you reach the Blissful Love stage of a relationship, the love, respect, and attraction that you and your woman feel for each other deepens over time.

You feel sexually attracted to each other for life.

You’re in love with each other for life.

You respect each other for life.

You have an amazing relationship and you’re one of those couples that people look at and think, “How do they do it? Why are they so happy? Why don’t I have what they have?”

The Stages, How Each One Works and Where Couples Go Wrong

So, let’s have a look at each of the stages of a relationship.

I’ll explain how it works, where couples go wrong and what you need to do to get to stage five where you experience Blissful Love and want to stay together for life.

1. Lust and Romance

Lust and romance stage

This is where you feel very sexually attracted to each other at the start and you fall in love, which is different to true committed love at the Blissful Love stage of a relationship.

In stage one, you don’t really care about each other’s faults.

You just want to be together, have sex and enjoy each other’s company.

According to scientists, at this stage of a relationship, natural chemicals are released in the brain to make a couple want to be together, have sex and stay together long enough for offspring to be created.

Love and lust chemicals released into the brain

So, in the lust and romance stage of a relationship, which is otherwise known as the dating phase, the man and woman will experience a dump of natural chemicals in their brain.

Chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, phenylethylamine and norepinephrine.

Unfortunately, most Hollywood movies show this stage of a relationship as being the peak of a relationship, so many people expect a relationship to just be like that for life, without having to go through any other stages of development.

The couple walks off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

So, for a lot of real life couples these days, when the first stage of a relationship starts to calm down, they begin to wonder, “Hang on, is this the right person for me? I’m not feeling the way I used to feel about her and she’s not behaving the way that she used to behave. She’s not looking at me in the same way as when we were dating. Does that mean that we’re not a match?”

As a result of the confusion, a lot of couples break up shortly after the Lust and Romance stage starts to calm down.

They simply don’t know that there are different stages to a relationship and that they can eventually get to Blissful Love if they stick together and ride the bumps all the way to victory.

The next stage of a relationship is the power struggle…

2. Power Struggle

Power struggle stage of a relationship

This is also where a lot of couples break up because their behavior changes and depending on how each person reacts, it will either bring them together or drive them apart.

For example: Sometimes a man will be shocked to realize that his woman isn’t behaving in the same way that she used to.

She was so nice and sweet to him at the start, but now she’s arguing with him, throwing tantrum and trying to get her way all the time.

When a guy is faced with that situation, he will sometimes make the mistake of gradually giving his woman too much power.

Relationship falling apart at the power struggle stage

The more power he gives her and the more he tries to suck up to her and do whatever she wants, the less respect and attraction she feels for him.

Some couples can stay together for a long time if the man hands over his power to the woman, but neither of them will ever truly be happy and reach Blissful Love.

When a man hands over his power to a woman because he doesn’t know how else to please her, she loses respect for him and gradually stops feeling attracted to him.

Eventually, she falls out of love with him.

She might stay with him (e.g. to pay off the mortgage, raise the children, avoid the embarrassment of breaking up or getting divorced), but she won’t be blissfully in love with him.

He handed over his power to her and she no longer feels like a real woman (i.e. feminine, girly, free to be emotional, totally in love with her man) anymore.

So, the relationship begins to feel strained, forced and could break up at any moment if a serious fight or argument makes one of them feel like enough is enough.

To get past the Power Struggle stage, you need to make sure that you are in the position of power as the man.

What a woman really wants is for a man to be in the position of power (even though she will rarely, if ever, admit that in public because she doesn’t want men to get the wrong idea and start bossing her around because they hope it will make her want sex or a relationship).

Even though a woman does want a good man who treats her well, she doesn’t want a pushover type of guy who does whatever she wants because he’s either afraid of losing her, or lacks the emotional masculinity to stand up and be a man.

She wants a man that she can look up to and respect, not a guy that she has to carry throughout life.

Being a man in the relationship isn’t about bossing her around, being rude, being aggressive or anything old school like that.

It’s simply about being the more emotionally strong one in the relationship, leading the way and allowing her to feel like a real woman in the relationship.

When you do that, she will naturally and happily support you, love you and be there for you in any way she can.

In other words, she will be devoted to you and be a loving, caring, supportive woman.

However, if you hand over power to her, she will feel stressed and resent you for not having the balls to be the man.

If she gets bored of the relationship and happens to meet a man who can take on the position of power, she will naturally feel attracted to him and may open herself up to cheating, or to breaking up with you to then be with him instead.

The third stage of a relationship is the Working stage of a relationship…

3. Working

This is where the relationship is working.

So, let’s assume that a man was able to get past the Power Struggle stage with his woman and he is clearly in the position of power.

They’re in love with each other and the relationship is working.

A lot of couples do get to this point, but this is also where a lot of couples break up.

Relationship losing its spark at the working stage

What happens is that over time, they start to become more like friends.

They don’t put in the effort anymore to make each other feel attracted and they start to take each other’s love, attraction and commitment for granted.

The relationship then goes from Working, to boring and then to falling apart.

Either the man or the woman will start thinking about cheating or leaving because they just don’t feel like they’re in love anymore.

The man doesn’t feel much attraction for her.

She doesn’t feel much attraction for him.

They feel more like friends, roommates or housemates and it’s quite boring.

That’s not a fun type of relationship.

It’s not the Blissful Love type of relationship that you experience at stage five.

By the way…

Some men will ruin the relationship when it has been working by becoming too domineering or controlling.

A man will assume that if she liked him taking on the position of power, then she will really like him taking away all of her power and essentially controlling her life, her decisions, her feelings and her actions.

Obviously that isn’t what a woman wants.

A woman wants a man who has the confidence and emotional masculinity (i.e balls) to take on the position of power, but she also wants him to be respectful, loving and kind to her.

Being the man isn’t about being a domineering asshole who rules over a woman’s life.

It’s about being the emotionally strong man (i.e. you’re always emotionally strong no matter what you and her face or encounter in life) that she can look up to, respect and love.

If you do that, a woman will be so damn good to you for life.

She will know that it would be next to impossible for her to find another man like you and as a result, she won’t want to ever cheat on you or leave you.

The fourth stage of a relationship is commitment…

4. Commitment

So, let’s assume that the man was able to get past the Power Struggle stage, he then got the relationship to the Working stage and they remained in love.

As a result, the love, respect and attraction between him and her started to deepen over time.

The love wasn’t fading away. The spark wasn’t dying out. The spark was still there.

They were still in love and it was starting to deepen.

At that point in a relationship, it makes total sense to the man and the woman to commit to each other.

Most couples then either commit to having a relationship and staying together for life, but not getting married, or they get engaged and married.

If they haven’t already moved in together, they do that at stage four.

If they’ve already moved in together, they start thinking about planning a family and begin working towards long-term mutually rewarding goals.

Unfortunately, though, many couples also break up after the Commitment stage of a relationship.

Relationship falling apart after commitment

When they first moved in together, got engaged or married, it all felt great.

However, over time, the relationship started to fall apart.

For example: The man started to cause his woman to lose respect for him by getting into arguments with her all the time and creating stress in their relationship.

Alternatively, he may have become clingy, needy or controlling and caused her to lose respect and attraction for him as a result of that.

What happens in a lot of relationships is that once a man has gotten his woman to move in with him, or get engaged or married, he slowly changes how he treats his woman.

In the first stage of the relationship (Lust and Romance), he may have taken her on lots of sweet, romantic or loving dates and seduced her into having a relationship with him.

When the relationship was Working and he got her to commit to him, he was most likely still on his best behavior, treating her well and keeping the relationship together.

Yet, after she committed to him and moved in with him, he gradually started to take her for granted (e.g. he became irritable around her, got into pointless arguments with her, insulted her often, complained about unimportant things all the time, stopped caring about how she felt and only cared about how he felt, expected her to respect him at all times, but he didn’t offer her the same in return).

Relationship falling apart after commitment

Unlike in the past where a woman would stay with a man for life because it was shameful to break up or get divorced, in today’s world, women are free to break up with or get divorced from a man.

So, to keep a relationship together for life, you’ve got to make sure that you get it to the fifth stage, Blissful love.

5. Blissful love

Blissful love

This is the ultimate prize of a relationship between a man and a woman.

It’s the ultimate reward.

This is the best part of a relationship that you can ever experience, where you finally reach what people refer to as true love.

From that point onwards, you then experience lifelong happiness together as a couple where you enjoy spending time together, cuddling, kissing, having sex and achieving long-term mutually rewarding goals together.

Blissful love

Getting to the blissful love stage of a relationship also prevents both you and her from wanting to cheat.

The idea of cheating or leaving each other for someone else seems like the dumbest idea in the world because you’re so in love.

You enjoy each other’s company so much.

You’re sexually attracted to each other, even though you’ve been together for years or decades.

You feel so good around each other and are achieving mutually rewarding long-term goals together, so there’s no reason to leave each other.

By the way…

I know this from personal experience because I’m happily married and my wife and I have been at the Blissful Love stage of our relationship for a long, long time.

It literally gets better and better over time.

That’s how it supposed to be.

When you get to Blissful Love and keep it there, you and her only want to be with each other.

There is no desire to cheat or leave because you already have exactly what you want and it feels amazing.

So, when you get your relationship to Blissful Love and keep it there, your woman will also never want to leave you.

Women know (from personal experience and from seeing what other women they know have gone through) that it’s very difficult to find a man who can get a relationship to Blissful Love and keep it there.

So, when she finds a man who has that ability, there is no reason to leave him or cheat on him.

She already has her perfect man.

There’s nothing that she needs from other men because she’s already getting it with you.

The type of love that you experience at the Blissful Love stage of a relationship is different and arguably, it’s way better than what you experience at the start (Lust and Romance).

What you experience at the start of a relationship is enjoyable.

It’s fun.

You get that brain dump of chemicals and you want to be around each other all the time, but the same thing applies at the Blissful Love stage of a relationship.

Yet, it’s a little bit different.

What happens is that both you and her experience what I call love attraction.

Love attraction is where both you and her feel completely attracted to each other even though you’ve been together for years or decades.

Even though you may have gotten some wrinkles over time, put on some weight, lost some weight, no longer have the muscles that you used to or she doesn’t have the shapes that she used to, you are still both completely attracted to each other.

None of the changes to your physical appearance really matter because you are experiencing love attraction for each other, which is deeper and lasts for life.

You might have seen love attraction in action when you’ve observed older couples who are still madly in love even though they’ve been together for decades.

They still hold hands, they cuddle, they kiss and they look at each other with loving eyes.

That is what happens when you get to the Blissful Love stage of a relationship and keep it there.